1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for administering participant attendance of teleconferences.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today enable users to exchange information efficiently. One way in which a computer system enables such efficient exchange of information is through calendar applications that allow a user to schedule meetings, such as teleconferences. Problems arise, however, when a person, say ‘Joe,’ is presently in a first teleconference, but scheduled to participate in a second, different teleconference with different parties, say ‘Mary’ and ‘Bob.’ In current art, there are very few ways for Joe to inform Mary or Bob that Joe will be either late to the second teleconference or absent completely. Email applications and instant messaging (‘IM’) applications are two tools in the current art which may be used to inform parties of a possible or current conflict, but both tools are inefficient for such use. Email applications, for example, may involve a delay and be disruptive to the conflicting teleconference. IM applications, in the same manner, are typically extremely disruptive causing a user to lose focus on the presently conflicting teleconference.